The integrated use of telecommunications and informatics is known as telematics. Vehicle telematics systems may be used for a number of purposes, including collecting road tolls, pay-as-you-drive insurance, managing road usage (intelligent transportation systems), tracking fleet vehicle locations, recovering stolen vehicles, providing automatic collision notification, location-driven driver information services and in-vehicle early warning notification alert systems (car accident prevention such as e-Call or b-Call).
Road tolling is considered as the first likely large volume market for vehicle telematics. Telematics is now beginning to enter the consumer car environment as a service box for closed services such as e-Call, theft prevention, car breakdown assistance etc. These markets have been low in volume so far and are considered as niche markets. The European Union with The Netherlands as a leading country has the intention to introduce road tolling as an obligatory function for every car from 2012 onwards.
So far, road tolling has been used for high way billing, truck billing and billing for driving a car in a certain area (e.g. London city). Toll plazas at which vehicles must stop are generally used, or else short range communications systems allow automatic debiting of a fund when a vehicle passes. The road tolling functions required in the near future will impose the requirement for less (or no) infrastructure and will impose tolling for every mile driven.
It is envisaged that an on-board equipment (OBE) in the vehicle (e.g. a car or truck or the like) will employ the global positioning system (GPS) (more generally a global navigation satellite system, GNSS) on-board and communicate via a mobile communication connection such as mobile telephony network, e.g. the Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM), to enable information to be relayed to a centralized road tolling apparatus for use in determining a road toll due, or for other purposes.
The charging system in an automated road toll system can be based on one or more of the distance travelled, the time, location, and vehicle characteristics. The road tolling may apply to all vehicles or it may exclude certain classes of vehicle (for example with foreign number plates). The cost can be calculated based on the path taken by the vehicle, as reported by OBE. For instance, the OBE as the mobile apparatus of the system is used to establish an internet-like connection with the road tolling back-end server of the stationary apparatus of the system.
There are two basic types of a mobile entity (or mobile apparatus) or OBE, and these will be described as “super-fat” and “thin” client solutions. In the super-fat client scenario, it is the OBE that processes the GPS data to perform map matching and trip cost computation, before transmitting the resulting trip cost to the road tolling back-end server. In this connection it is noted, that the term “trip” is used for undertaking a travel from “point A to point B” independent from a certain route or itinerary. It is very easy to maintain driver privacy in this scenario; since the GPS data remain within the OBE and only a single FIGURE (the trip cost) along with the OBE identity are communicated externally.
In the thin client scenario, the map matching and trip cost computation steps are performed by an external server, hence endangering the privacy of the driver, either because the data could be intercepted by a third party during transmission or because (in the worst case) the external server could itself be part of governmental, e.g. law enforcement authorities/agencies, or organizational monitoring of individuals' travels. In the standard solution for the thin client scenario, the drivers have no other choice than to trust that the system is robust and that their data are not used for other purposes than the road tolling application. The thin client scenario has the advantage that the computation power needed by the OBE is lower, and that only the back-end server needs to be updated when maps are updated.
WO 2009/001303 A1 discloses a road toll system employing vehicle mounted equipment having a satellite navigation receiver. The map matching and trip cost computation steps are anonymously delegated by the on-board equipment to an external unit.